The importance of environmentally friendly cars

Environmentally friendly cars.

Disclaimer: This is a guest post by Sean who knows an immense amount about cars.

Not everybody can make the switch to environmentally friendly cars. For those who are driving old beat up used cars, switching to a hybrid, for instance, might not be a realistic option. For those who can, though, there are few excuses not to. Let’s consider the most practical factor involved in switching to an environmentally friendly car: cost.

The main thing that these cars offer, the main way in which they’re better for the environment, is in the conservation of gas. A hybrid or just a car designed to use up less fuel by using gasoline more efficiently saves gas, and saves money. For this reason alone, an environmentally friendly car is an investment that can save the driver a lot of cash over time and in some cases even pay for itself.

Many newer non-hybrid cars promise savings of around 33% on gas mileage compared to earlier models. This isn’t even compared to gas guzzling classics or anything, but cars from just a few years ago. This means that for someone spending, say, a modest $1800 a year on gas, that would make for savings of $600 every year. Realistically, most people spend much more than just two thousand dollars a year on gas, of course. Some people spend that much every month.

Hybrids manage to make up the difference by way of combining the power of a combustion engine with that of one or several electric motors. This hybrid approach offers the power of a combustion engine with the lower energy consumption of an electric motor.

Why not full on electric cars? These do exist, but creating electric cars that are safe to be driven on the streets, that can easily and safely reach sixty miles per hour in twelve seconds, and then maintain that speed, is still prohibitively expensive.

Another approach is hydrogen motors. At this point, the technology to maintain a reliable hydrogen engine is still some years away. Hydrogen isn’t hard to find, of course. The problem is that hydrogen has a habit of immediately clinging to oxygen to create water.

Other cars simply manage to reduce the use of gasoline by way of more efficiently built engines. For instance, the diesel powered Mercedes-Benz Bionic is a concept car which has achieved fuel efficiency as high as four times that of the average vehicle today, at an incredible eighty four miles to the gallon.

Some people will drive home the point that we may have run out of gasoline in another fifteen or twenty years. It’s easy to scoff at these claims and many of these conclusions are based on studies that are sketchy at best, but the bottom line is that we only have so much fossil fuel left. Whether we run out in fifteen years or fifty, the fact remains that sooner or later, our whole infrastructure will have to change. That includes our cars, but it also includes our power plants and even how we dispose of trash. Right now we are far too reliant on oil, and that will have to change.